Within the halls of IBM these days, the No. 1 competitive topic on everybody's mind is competing with EMC. And heading up the IBM posse to take out EMC is Denise Buonaiuto, vice president of global business partner sales for IBM's Systems and Technology Group.

I decided to write my impressions about one particular part of its 2005 strategy, business processing outsourcing (BPO), as an extended blog entry, because in some ways I believe BPO is just an extension of the whole managed services dialogue.